When you're trying to relax or you're trying to be happy and not think about things. The part of the brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're using to do the shutting down. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Edward Slingerland, Research Chair and Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. Edward is also the Director of Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium a k A CIRQUE and the co director for the Center of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. His new book is Trying Not to Try, the Art of Science and Spontaneity. Here's the interview. Hi, Ted, Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to have you on your book, Trying Not to Try Ancient China, Modern Science and the Power of Spontaneity. I was really excited to read it, and I was excited to see that the Dowd Ching is a part of it that you have in there often, which is a book that I have long been a fan of it. I really I thought your analysis of it was really interesting, and I also loved the line where you hazarded a guest that more joints have been rolled and since burned in the presence of that book than any other. Yeah. I don't have any I don't have any references for that. It's speculation. I think it's saying about a trade book you can you can go out on a limb. I think it's a decent guest. I think it's a decent guess. Yeah. So we'll start with the parable like we always do. So. Our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, well, with regard to the work I do, there's a lot of ways you can see this parable connecting with the this paradox of how you try not to try. So you can think about at its most basic, this tension you have when you're trying to relax, when you're trying to be spontaneous, is the conscious mind fighting with the unconscious mind. So's whnt to think of them as the two wolves. You've got the trying part of you that's commenting, it's it's it's giving you guidance. It's trying to get you to do things. And then you've got your embodied mind. You've got your mind that actually knows how to do things. That's that's trying to take over, and that's the tension between them. And I think you see this at and I think the best way to understand that the paradox is this game called mind ball that I talked about in the beginning of the book, where you're, uh, you're hooked up to an e G monitor and you're trying to push a ball to the other end of the table. And the way you push it is by relaxing, because the e G monitors picking up alphin data ways, which is what we produce when we're relaxed. And when you're playing this game, you know that you can't try. You know that the way to win it is to let go of winning. And it really does feel as if there are two forces in you fighting for dominance, and one of them is the conscious mind saying, oh, look the balls rolling back towards you. What should you do? How do you relax? Oh you're losing. What are you gonna do? And there's a part of you that that kind of knows how to relax that that you need to focus on. So if you want to think of shifting your attention as a kind of feeding of the internal parts of yourself, I think that's one of the ways in which the way you resolve the tension and the paradox of of trying not to try is by feeding the embodied mind, the part of you that has the skills, has the ability, but needs to be released, if you want to think of it that way. From the from the Clutches of the conscious mind. In your book, you describe a couple of thoughts or philosophies from from ancient China. One is away and the other is duh. Could you maybe tell us briefly what those are in context your book? And then I want to kind of cycle back to that idea of the unconscious and conscious mind and and the way that that that ties to those two concepts. Right, So basically, way literally means not not doing or no doing or no trying. Is sometimes translated as in action, but I think that's too passive a translation, because it's it's about a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent. You are relaxed, you don't feel as if you're exerting any effort and yet everything works perfectly, so you're very skillful in the world. You move through it perfectly. So it's a little bit like being in when athletes talk about being in the zone. It's kind of like that sort of state. So I I translated, if I have to translate it as effortless action or spontaneity, So that's the spontaneity and the subtitle of the book, but it's not it's spontaneity is not a great translation because I think in English it has a sense of almost recklessness, right or or irresponsibility, so you kind of spontaneously decide to skip work and go to the beach or something. And this idea of uway is in some ways the opposite. It's being perfectly engaged with the world and and operating in a kind of peak efficiency, if you want to think of it in that sense. So then this idea of unfortunately is pronounced uh carrot. Maybe charismatic virtue is the best way to translated. Is a power you have when you're in a state of way. So when you're in a way, you kick off this radiance that if you're a Confucian, it's what attracts people to you, so they want to follow you, and you don't have to force them to follow you, they just want to follow you spontaneously. If you're a Taoist, it's what relaxes people and kind of bring him back to naturalness. So you know, your your favorite book, the Dowda Jing, that does the power that the loud Saon sage has. It allows him to kind of bring everyone in the world back to naturalness. So it's a it's a it's a kind of charismatic traction force you kick off when you're you're in the state of way you talk in the book about and there's there's a number of other books recently that that talk about this idea of you know, maybe the fast mind and the slow mind or um, you know, the the you call it the tacit hot system, and you know more the explicit cold cognition, which is you know, also another way of sort of the conscious versus a little bit more of the the unconscious. Can you describe what those two systems are, how they work? And then um, you say that the goal of ouway is to get those two working together, two systems working together. Yeah, so the system. So every psychologist has her own terminology for the so people call it system one system too hot versus cold, explicit tacit. Everyone's got their own pet terminology. I like hot and cold because it gives you this sense of The hot system is fast. It's it's all the things we know how to do without having to think about it. So the hot system is things that are automatic there uh in our if you want to think about muscle memory or basal gangli of Embruary. Really it's stuff we know how to do without having to consciously think about it. And that's most of what we do. Of what we do in our daily lives is run by these hot systems. But we also have this other systems, the system to cold explicit cognition, which is this ability we have to stop think. It involves reflection, so our ability to think about, well is this a good thing to do? What are the consequences five days from now? How does this relate to other goals that I have. It also involves what psychologists called cognitive control, so the ability to suppres us one automatic reaction and replace it with another. So system too is important. It's a really it's it evolved for a very good reason human beings. It's what allows us to be so adaptable and flexible in our behavior. But part of the point of the book is that one way to understand way is it's it's the integration of insights. We need the insights of system to system too is what keeps us from just being kind of stupid doing the same thing every time. We We need system to to develop new school, new skills and new desires and abilities. But you need to basically download what you figure out through system to onto your hot systems. That's that's what all of these early Chinese thinkers you're trying to get you to do. And once you do that, the this transformed hot cognition, transformed system one is much more powerful and will lead you to much better places than the uncultivated form that would. Yeah, the best description of those two systems and you you reference in your book is the the elephant and the rider, the rider being the thinking brain um the system the system too, and the elephant being the unconscious And and the idea of you know, it's I've heard it mostly referenced in the ideas of trying to make changes to habitual patterns or different things, and that you know that that that unconscious system or the elephant is so powerful that and the writer has such a small amount of power in comparison that if you don't find and you talk about this the book, if you don't find a way to get that unconscious system or the elephant going in the same direction that the writer wants to go, that you're you. You meet with a lot of challenges. Yeah, I think John Height might be the one who have popularized that metaphor, and it is his goal in doing so was to emphasize the difference in size. You know, the riders really small. Our our conscious mind is has very limited capacity. It's overloaded very easily. And I also walk people through some of the literature and what's sometimes called ego depletion, so the fact that when you exert cognitive control it gets depleted. You then are less able to exert it in the next moment. So if you exert cognitive control and focus on a really hard math problem, uh, you're the next moment, you're you're less able to resist cookies, even though you're on a diet. You just your worldpower it gets depleted. And so any viable system where we're going to actually change our behavior has got to respect the elephant. It's got to take into account that we are this tiny rider, and you're not going to make the elephant do something radically different than what the elephant wants to do. But you can guide it, and you can nudge it in a certain direction. And and the nice thing about the rider is it's far sighted enough that it can kind of see down the line how nudging the elephant a little bit every day can actually get it to go to someplace that is in the long run, quite different from where it's going right now. One of the things that I found interest in reading through the book was several different places talking about that in order to get to the uway state to a certain degree, which I think you talk about in the book, is similar to the more modern psychological concept of flow, except that it's it's a it's a little bit broader than that. It's it's a little bit more social and values based than that. And we maybe we'll explore that a little bit later, but that one of the keys to getting into that state is being able to essentially downregulate the that that conscious mind. You talk a little bit about some of the science around how exercise has the ability to sort of downregulate that very conscious mind, and that's why people tend to experience maybe that runners high to a certain degree, that sense of oneness, that sense of ease and peace with the world. Um. You also talk about how there's science out there about the fact that if we think about and analyze things too much, that sort of rumination can actually impact our ability to experience and identify pleasure. Yeah, so this is you know, there's a lot of work has been done on the paradoxical effect of conscious intentions. So there are a lot of goals that we cannot pursue directly. So relaxation, happiness, attractiveness. Uh, they're the kind of creativity I think is one of these as well. When you pursue them directly, they they flee from you. And one of the things I talked about is why this would be so, and it's because it is directly. If you think about the two system nature of the human mind. When you're trying to relax or you're trying to be happy and not think about things, you're you're trying to you part of the brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're using to do the shutting down. So it's like trying to dissemble a bicycle while you're riding on it. It's just it's it's it's directly paradoxical. And so all of these early Chinese thinkers that I look at trying to come up with ways to get around what is what is paradox? And so it's important that to realize that it's a real paradox. If there was some kind of solution to it, would it would just go away and there wouldn't be all this to years of religious debate about how to get into these spiritual states. So the trick is how do you get around the paradox? And and that's where the debates happened about, you know, do you use meditative type techniques to use a lot of training and hope the training falls away. Each of the thinkers has their own particular view on how you how you get around the central tension of using your conscious mind to shut itself down. M M. You talk mainly about three main teachers Confucius laud say, did I say that correctly? Get louds of loudza? And then Mensius Menus and then also DWAs at the end. So the second daois thinker. So if we could maybe spend you know, a brief time on on the first couple menus is I found a lot of what was going on there resonated with a lot of things we talked about on the show. So maybe we'll dig a little bit deeper there. But let's start with Confucius. Yeah, so Confucius and also his later followers sins at the end of the Warring States, was an externalist, what I call an externalists. So basically the the and this is the classic Confucian strategy, which is how do you try not to try where you try really hard. So it's about training. It's about using ritual training, so you immerse yourself and these religious ritual wills. You mentally immerse yourself in the classics, so you memorize these ancient classics and you spend time with fellow students and teachers discussing them. You you play classical music, you do other cultural forms of dance and archery. And the idea is that these are all going to reshape you. You're inside in a certain way, and in the beginning it's going to be involved conscious striving. You're gonna have to try. You won't want to do it, it won't feel natural. But there's the claim is that if you do it for long enough, you'll you'll eventually internalize it. So you'll you'll download it into that that's that faster hot system or the the elephant will internalize it. Yeah, so you'll basically have a tame elephant. So if you if you work hard enough to get the elephant going in the right direction and eventually want to do it on its own. So the famous description of Confucius at age seventy, he says, you know, go through all these stages. You know, it's at my heart on learning, I did this and that. And then finally he says, at age seventy, I could follow my heart's desires and never transgress the bounds of propriety. So he could do whatever came into his heart mind, and yet it was all ritually perfect and morally perfect. So that's the confusion strategy. And then you have louds in the primitive is Dao is popping up and saying there's no way that's gonna work, and it's and the center of their critique is really it's not necessarily exactly explicitly the way they put it, but I think it could be put this way is that the confusion strategy makes a lot of sense when you're talking about a physical skill. So it's really clear how if you want to learn how to play tennis, well just training and training and drilling over and over again. Or you want to learn to play the piano, so you do your scales and you practice that. Eventually it's going to be internalized, and the fact that it's not at first is not a problem. Everyone understands how skills are required over time. But when it comes to away that the way the Confucians and Dallas are pursuing, it's really about moral skills. It's not about really being good at playing the piano. It's about being a good person. It's about being compassionate, being empathetic, being fair, and so there is a tension there. Actually Aristotle identified this in the West as well as his tension that he called it the dis analogy between crafts and virtues. But it's basically the case that so if I'm playing the piano and I play a beautifully moving piece and you are moved to tears, and you assume I'm feeling the same thing you're feeling. If you find out later that I wasn't feeling what you were feeling. I was actually thinking about how much money I was going to make. I'm looking out into the audience that they know ticket sales are good. I'm going to make some money off this thing. It doesn't invalidate the performance. It was still a great performance. Virtues, though, are different. So if I see you doing something that seems compassionate, so you give money to a homeless person, you help someone in need, and then I find out later that you did it because you saw me watching, and you weren't motivated by compassion. You were motivated by wanting to impress me, it's no longer it's invalidated. Your action is invalidated. It's no longer a virtue. So we have a very strong feeling that virtuous action requires the right internal motivation. And this is really the heart of the what Louds is worried about with a confusion strategy is that you train people how to be So you have a bunch of people who aren't compassionate, so you get them to do these rituals that express compassion. You get them to read about compassionate people a great compassionate sage kings. You get them to play compassionate music that expresses kind of longing and sorrow about the suffering of the people. Um And but how how is all that training every going to take someone who doesn't feel compassionate and make them really feel it? And what louds of things is going to happen is you're gonna get a bunch of fakers. You're gonna get a bunch of people who can talk until the end of the day about compassion, but they don't actually have the real virtue. And so he his argument is you've got to stop trying, and actually trying is the problem. And if you could shut down your conscious mind and avoid entanglements with these confusions and all their cultural forms and all this this kind of hypocritical stuff they're trying to teach you, you can get back in touch with your really virtuous nature, which has always been there. It's just been waiting for you to uncover it. And that's that's the Daoist strategy, is kind of going back to nature and going back to some kind of original goodness. What I found really interested in reading your book about the Daoist strategy and it's sort of the thing that it's not my favorite book, but it's a book I certainly enjoyed him as aspired is a lot of it is like, well, how how do you how do you do that? What do you do? How do you become that? That sort of thing. And the other thing I was struck by was how it felt to me a little bit like the Daoist side was that we're all inherently good, and civilization and messes us up, which is also very much a Buddhist Buddha nature kind of thought. And then there's also you go to the Western side, which is much more, at least from a Christianity perspective, we are we are bad, original sin, and we are cultured into being better, which is more the Confucian type ideal. And what I really liked about the Menus part was that he seemed to have what seems to me at least the view I take, which is that we've got some of all that in us, and it's a it's a matter of it's back to that parable what are we cultivating? And so that's why I thought a lot of what Mentius was talking about struck like the right balance to me between those two things, maybe you could share a little bit more about his approach. Yeah. So, actually Menshas is the other place where I think the parable really applies to this this early Chinese material, although not quite in the way Mensha's intends. So he's an interesting figure. So he's a Confucian, he's technically a confusion. He thinks he's a follower of Confucius. But if you I argue in the book, and I think it's the case that he's really trying to straddle both sides. So he's arguing, Okay, we have this nature. That's how do we become compassionate If we're not already compassionate, it's because we have the sprouts of compassion inside of us, and if we were careful and we pay attention to our feelings, we can identify these little sprouts of compassion. So there's famous story where he interrogates this king who's a famously evil king. He's oppressing his people. He's he's likes to drink and hang out with his concubines and basically kill people. That's why he enjoys host kind of like a co host. Yeah, so he says to him, you know, you can actually be a true Confucian king, and the king says, well, you obviously don't know me. Look at me. This is what I like to do. And then Mensche tells him the story that he heard from one of his ministers about him sparing the ox, and he walks him through what he was feeling, and the king basically admits he's it's a great dialogue. It's psychologically very rich, because the king gets very embarrassed, and then he finally admits, yeah, I saw this ox being led to slaughter, and he said, had this expression on its face of a look of terror that I couldn't bear. I couldn't bear the sight of this, this look of terror. And Mena says that feeling you had then is the sprout of true benevolence, and if you could actually focus on that thing and strengthen it and bring it out and make it stronger, you will start moving down the road towards being a true king instead of being this terrible tyrant that you are now. So he thinks that we have this set of good sprouts and they don't grow naturally, so that it's like agriculture. You have to water, you have to weed, it requires efforts. So that's the kind of confusion side of it, right, You got to do self cultivation. You need the classics, you need ritual but it's all basically pulling out potentialities, moral potentialities that you have within you if you reflect enough. Now Menches where it doesn't quite fit the parable as Menshes doesn't think that there are other bad sprouts, But I think that actually, if we want to update Menches, a more plausible modern view of the mind is that we you know, we have different sets of dispositions and they serve Some of them are very ancient ones that'serve very good purposes back in our evolutionary history and maybe aren't so appropriate now the way we live now. Others are ones we've learned that may be because of a bad environment or bad experiences, are bad training. And so then I think modernizing Mensches and bringing him into harmony with his parable about the two wolves. What self cultivation is about and getting into the right kind of way is about is figuring out which of these sprouts inside you are the good ones, and identifying them and then focusing on them and trying to strengthen those at the expense of the ones you don't like as much, and that don't lead you in the right direction. So that's mentions. His position, in a way is the compromise position. We have these potentialities within us, but they're not going to grow by themselves anymore than corn is just going to grow if you throw a the ground. You gotta do some work. But you also are working together with with things that are inside potentialities that are within you, which also explains how you can get a virtue that you don't already have because you're actually you do have it, it's just their potential form. It's got to be strengthened. You talked about the mention U way cultivation is about feeling and imagination. That you make a reference between analog and digital processes, and that um that changing our behavior is more of an analog process in the mentioned way. Could you explain that this is a contrast with the dominant theories of ethics in the West, the modern Western philosophy, which are about all systems too, if you want to think of it that way. They're about cold cognition. So how do you learn you're not compassionate right now? How do you learn to be compassionate while you either learn a set of mac sims. So if you're you're deontologists, you learn the categorical imperative, and you learn how to use these rules essentially and figure out which rules apply in any given situation. Then you apply them. You force yourself to act in accordance with the rules. Who are your utilitarian and you say, well, how do you act compassionately? Well, we've got to figure out what's going to maximize whatever good you happen to value for people in this situation. You do the math, and then you act in accordance with what the math tells you to do. And there were people like this in early China too, so there were these most too. Menchu was arguing against who our utilitarians. They were consequentialists and very rationalistic. Mench just thinks that that's actually not gonna work because you want to put this way, because the elephants too strong the ride. The rider doesn't have the ability to just go, oh, we need to go over here and just make the elephant go that way. It just is not gonna work. And if you try to do it, it's gonna piss the elephant off and things are gonna get really ugly. So men just actually thinks it's actively dangerous to to rely upon cold cognition only. So in his model, you do have some help from culture, So you have teachers telling you, you know, these are the kind of impulses that you want to focus on. Uh. And I argue you can see Manches in this dialogue with the King is kind of a moral psychoanalyst. He's like, well, how did you feel when you saw the ox? And you know, how does that? And then how do you feel when you see your people suffering? And the King's like, well, it doesn't bother me, feel pretty fine, and he gets in to see, well, don't you see how that's there's a kind of attention there, and maybe you could try to take that feeling that you had with the ox and learn how to extend it, but crucially slowly. So he says to the king, you know, first try just being a little bit nicer to your family, and then once you get better at that, you can learn how to extend that to people who aren't part of your family. So the idea that the way moral training works is through imaginative extension. You're using your whole body when you're remembering an emotional experience. It's not an abstract thing. You're remembering how you felt. You remember how your stomach clenched when you saw that ox and you felt really bad, and you're then trying to use your imagination to figure out how you could have that same kind of feeling in a place you should be having it where you're not when you see your people suffering because you over tax them or you you make them labor on your palace. So so this is the sense in which I think this confusion model of cultivating using emotions and cultivating your senses is much more empirically plausible. It's much more plausible from a modern psychological perspective than these abstract, ammodal digital forms of ethics that we've had for the last couple hundred years in the West. I'm really drawn to that idea because it's that whole idea sort of of you know, you have these sprouts or these tendencies, and then you can start very small and build upon those in a in a very small way. So that idea of, well, if you don't feel really compassionate in general and you want to learn that, start with something that's really easy to be compassionate towards like your dog, right, you know, you know, it's you know, being compassionate to Chris over here might be a stretch for me. But but but but but his dog, Charlie. Um, but I it's that's that's a common theme that we we talk a lot about on the show, is is starting really small and if you do that, you can you can build. And I really like also that thought of imagination emotion, and I think you talk about in the book because it's something I've been talking about with people recently, and I think it's also in the book around the purpose of you know, one of the reasons that I think literature or movies can be so powerful is because there's a call it moral training if you want. But they're teaching us about the human condition in a very emotional way, which is a lot different than like, as you said, sort of being taught here's the right thing to do, thinking the right thing versus feeling what feels right. Ye, And they're kind of it's like exercise for your moral emotions, especially because you know, literature and now movies allow you to be in a situation that you would not normally be in. So it allows you to experience extreme moral situations, especially when some kid hopefully you will never experience in your real life. Um. But being put in that position and empathizing, having to think your way, feel your way into someone else's position strengthens your moral intuitions and extends them in various ways. And that's precisely the way Menschez is using the classics. For instance, he thinks that these, you know, the poems and the stories about the sage kings are like reading great literature where you actually learn to feel the right kind of things because you're you're being exposed to these emotional experiences vicariously through through literature. Near the end of the book, you kind of wrap things is up by talking about the reason that we tend to be interested in uway and UH is that you know uway is that that feeling of being completely engaged in what you're doing being very effective. And then the dog is more the charisma or the drawing people towards us. And you say that these different Chinese philosophers, what they recommend may work differently in different situations. Um, And could you maybe extrapolate a little bit on that, like, what what are some of the types of things. If I was trying to do this sort of thing, I might think about this approach, And again I like what you say, and that look, this is a genuine paradox. Trying not to try is is really hard to do, and achieving some of these states as hard, which is why people are still thinking about it and talking about it. But you've got a couple guidelines that people might think about. Yeah, well, one of my arguments is the reason we have these different strategies and and none of them ever go away, and no one ever wins, so uh know, and when Zen Buddhism comes into China's and Buddhism takes a really hard kind of z in daois line. So we're not gonna do any practice. If you're going to be a Zen Buddhists, you know, we're gonna just do nothing and just you know, see your Buddha nature and that's it. But very quickly they started setting up practices and you get the split between these different schools of Zen john Buddhism, Um, that's one of them starts to look very gradual. It's like, yeah, we want to see our Buddha nature. We are Buddhas, but we gotta sits Zen for thirty years and to all these rituals. Um. So why is it that none of them ever win? And it's because I think so. First of all, there's differences and people's inborn personalities. So I really think some of these strategies work better for some people than others. So people who tend to be overstructured and tend to not respond flexibly to the world probably need the Daoist techniques a bit more. And I think that's why I've always loved Dwongs of the of the Daoist text, and probably because I'm kind of a creature of habit, kind of uptight, like I like my things the way they are. I don't like new experiences. I kind of uh. And so I think people need different things to break them out of the types of bad habits that they're into. Um. Whereas if you tend to be unstructured and undisciplined, this Confucian training, giving yourself some structure in your life and and having rituals and having particular ways you structure your physical space, how you set up your room and how you set up your office and doing things at certain times every day could be incredible exactly what you need to kind of liberate yourself into spontaneity because you you you need that kind of structure. So there's in our personal differences and it really, I think depends on the individual. You're also going to expect life stage differences. So children are going to be doing more the Confucian stuff than the Daoist stuff. Kids are kind of natural Daoist, that's not they don't need more. They don't need more. Doubt is that what they need is a lot of confusionism, right, because you just don't have the right dispositions. Yet nobody's arguing that the kind of way you want is the way of a three year old. Anyone who's had a three year old realizes that that's not who we want to be. So they need Confucianism, they need structure, they need training, they need to acquire new skills and so but then do you know the converses as you get mature and as you've acquired the types of skills you need, that's when maybe you need to shift into more of the Daoist strategy of letting go or making your mind empty or not trying. Because you've now trained your dispositions, you have everything on board that you need. And the trick now it's actually stopping thinking, letting go. So it's life stage is gonna matter, and then the particular situation is gonna matter, so and and this is something you really have to kind of diagnose on the fly or have your own you know, the king King Shin of Chi is lucky because he had his own personal way advisor next to him in the form of mentions telling him what he needed to focus on. But in any given situation, there are times when if you reflect, you'll realize, Okay, my problem here is that I'm just flowling around. I don't have structure, and if I actually really want to get into the zone and whatever activity is I'm doing here, I need to be more organized about it. I need to have a schedule, I need to have forums. I have to have physical forms given to me um to act in the right way. Whereas there are other times where it's the problem is you're just thinking too much and you're second guessing yourself, or you're thinking about irrelevant things. So you're thinking about, uh, you know, the famous story and the dwongsa is that when people are shooting, having an archery contest and they're just shooting for you know, basically buckles, belt buckles. They their skill is perfect. They start betting for beer money and they their skill gets a little shaky and they start betting for serious money and suddenly, uh, they don't have the same skill they had at the beginning. It's because external considerations are invading your mind and interfering with your ability to focus on your your embodied skill, which which is something you already have. I think the you know, some of the more Confucian approaches, the idea of of putting structure in your life. Um, we we talk about you know, there's I think there's a lot of different readily available information there. What are some of the ways to, as we said earlier, sort of downregulate that thinking mind. We talked a little bit about exercise reference to meditation throughout the book. Yeah, alcohol you talk about at a few points, which is remarkably effective. Um, are there other other other other thoughts there that that that emerged from from some of this learning? Yeah? I think so there's you know, there's chemical means. So one of the reasons I think we like alcohol and drugs is they downregulate our preferntal cortex. That's physiologically what they're doing, and that's the seat of our cold cognition. So it's a kind of fast and dirty way to get into a form of a way. And actually people like Dwongs that use drunkenness as an analogy for for what the spiritual state he wants you to get into. But it's the problem is alcohol wears off and it's it has other side effects that aren't that great. Um. So most of the strategies that the Daoist used, I think could be summed up as using your body to distract your mind. So you're using your body in a way that is either going to distract you from your thoughts so that your thoughts kind of peed aro out on their own, or you're using your body in such a way that your thoughts just naturally damp down, they naturally fade away. And so these people are probably the ones who invented these sitting practices. So, um, they don't talk a lot about them in the Worrying States text that I study, but there's hints that people are sitting meditation there. This one artists says before he goes off to car of wood stands, he sits and forgets it's all along. He forgets about his body and everything. So it seems involved some sort of seated meditation. And the idea is you can use breathing exercises or objectless meditations, so sitting in a certain position and letting your mind clear itself as a way to re empower your body if you want to think about it that way, and let it take over when it needs to take over. But this is of course, you know, people years longer than that coming up with all sorts of techniques for doing this excellent. Well, I think we are kind of at the end of our time. But what I found interesting, you know, kind of kind of coming back to there. There were two last things. One was I was struck by that sort of mention is sort of walking what we would think of is sort of the middle way, which I thought was was really interesting. But I really like the way you tied that up at the end that hey, there's no one size fits all all um depending on all those different circumstances, which I thought was really helpful because it's easy to get locked into thinking if we just do this thing. And the other thing I thought was interesting is that a lot of times, something that works for us today doesn't work for us tomorrow or the week after, and I think that's really really important. And then, um, I thought the best example of what U way is really like and duh was when you referenced Jonathan Richmond's Pablo Picasso as the perfect example of that. So I thought that was thought that was a great way to uh to describe that for the the modern uh punk rock lover, I suppose, um, for anybody who's familiar with that. But Ted, thanks so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed the book. Oh thanks, thanks for having me on the show. All right, take care bye. Yeah. You can learn more about Edward Slingerland and this podcast at one new feed dot net slash Edward

When you're trying to relax or you're trying to be happy and not think about things. The part of the brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're using to do the shutting down. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Edward Slingerland, Research Chair and Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. Edward is also the Director of Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium a k A CIRQUE and the co director for the Center of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. His new book is Trying Not to Try, the Art of Science and Spontaneity. Here's the interview. Hi, Ted, Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to have you on your book, Trying Not to Try Ancient China, Modern Science and the Power of Spontaneity. I was really excited to read it, and I was excited to see that the Dowd Ching is a part of it that you have in there often, which is a book that I have long been a fan of it. I really I thought your analysis of it was really interesting, and I also loved the line where you hazarded a guest that more joints have been rolled and since burned in the presence of that book than any other. Yeah. I don't have any I don't have any references for that. It's speculation. I think it's saying about a trade book you can you can go out on a limb. I think it's a decent guest. I think it's a decent guess. Yeah. So we'll start with the parable like we always do. So. Our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, well, with regard to the work I do, there's a lot of ways you can see this parable connecting with the this paradox of how you try not to try. So you can think about at its most basic, this tension you have when you're trying to relax, when you're trying to be spontaneous, is the conscious mind fighting with the unconscious mind. So's whnt to think of them as the two wolves. You've got the trying part of you that's commenting, it's it's it's giving you guidance. It's trying to get you to do things. And then you've got your embodied mind. You've got your mind that actually knows how to do things. That's that's trying to take over, and that's the tension between them. And I think you see this at and I think the best way to understand that the paradox is this game called mind ball that I talked about in the beginning of the book, where you're, uh, you're hooked up to an e G monitor and you're trying to push a ball to the other end of the table. And the way you push it is by relaxing, because the e G monitors picking up alphin data ways, which is what we produce when we're relaxed. And when you're playing this game, you know that you can't try. You know that the way to win it is to let go of winning. And it really does feel as if there are two forces in you fighting for dominance, and one of them is the conscious mind saying, oh, look the balls rolling back towards you. What should you do? How do you relax? Oh you're losing. What are you gonna do? And there's a part of you that that kind of knows how to relax that that you need to focus on. So if you want to think of shifting your attention as a kind of feeding of the internal parts of yourself, I think that's one of the ways in which the way you resolve the tension and the paradox of of trying not to try is by feeding the embodied mind, the part of you that has the skills, has the ability, but needs to be released, if you want to think of it that way. From the from the Clutches of the conscious mind. In your book, you describe a couple of thoughts or philosophies from from ancient China. One is away and the other is duh. Could you maybe tell us briefly what those are in context your book? And then I want to kind of cycle back to that idea of the unconscious and conscious mind and and the way that that that ties to those two concepts. Right, So basically, way literally means not not doing or no doing or no trying. Is sometimes translated as in action, but I think that's too passive a translation, because it's it's about a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent. You are relaxed, you don't feel as if you're exerting any effort and yet everything works perfectly, so you're very skillful in the world. You move through it perfectly. So it's a little bit like being in when athletes talk about being in the zone. It's kind of like that sort of state. So I I translated, if I have to translate it as effortless action or spontaneity, So that's the spontaneity and the subtitle of the book, but it's not it's spontaneity is not a great translation because I think in English it has a sense of almost recklessness, right or or irresponsibility, so you kind of spontaneously decide to skip work and go to the beach or something. And this idea of uway is in some ways the opposite. It's being perfectly engaged with the world and and operating in a kind of peak efficiency, if you want to think of it in that sense. So then this idea of unfortunately is pronounced uh carrot. Maybe charismatic virtue is the best way to translated. Is a power you have when you're in a state of way. So when you're in a way, you kick off this radiance that if you're a Confucian, it's what attracts people to you, so they want to follow you, and you don't have to force them to follow you, they just want to follow you spontaneously. If you're a Taoist, it's what relaxes people and kind of bring him back to naturalness. So you know, your your favorite book, the Dowda Jing, that does the power that the loud Saon sage has. It allows him to kind of bring everyone in the world back to naturalness. So it's a it's a it's a kind of charismatic traction force you kick off when you're you're in the state of way you talk in the book about and there's there's a number of other books recently that that talk about this idea of you know, maybe the fast mind and the slow mind or um, you know, the the you call it the tacit hot system, and you know more the explicit cold cognition, which is you know, also another way of sort of the conscious versus a little bit more of the the unconscious. Can you describe what those two systems are, how they work? And then um, you say that the goal of ouway is to get those two working together, two systems working together. Yeah, so the system. So every psychologist has her own terminology for the so people call it system one system too hot versus cold, explicit tacit. Everyone's got their own pet terminology. I like hot and cold because it gives you this sense of The hot system is fast. It's it's all the things we know how to do without having to think about it. So the hot system is things that are automatic there uh in our if you want to think about muscle memory or basal gangli of Embruary. Really it's stuff we know how to do without having to consciously think about it. And that's most of what we do. Of what we do in our daily lives is run by these hot systems. But we also have this other systems, the system to cold explicit cognition, which is this ability we have to stop think. It involves reflection, so our ability to think about, well is this a good thing to do? What are the consequences five days from now? How does this relate to other goals that I have. It also involves what psychologists called cognitive control, so the ability to suppres us one automatic reaction and replace it with another. So system too is important. It's a really it's it evolved for a very good reason human beings. It's what allows us to be so adaptable and flexible in our behavior. But part of the point of the book is that one way to understand way is it's it's the integration of insights. We need the insights of system to system too is what keeps us from just being kind of stupid doing the same thing every time. We We need system to to develop new school, new skills and new desires and abilities. But you need to basically download what you figure out through system to onto your hot systems. That's that's what all of these early Chinese thinkers you're trying to get you to do. And once you do that, the this transformed hot cognition, transformed system one is much more powerful and will lead you to much better places than the uncultivated form that would. Yeah, the best description of those two systems and you you reference in your book is the the elephant and the rider, the rider being the thinking brain um the system the system too, and the elephant being the unconscious And and the idea of you know, it's I've heard it mostly referenced in the ideas of trying to make changes to habitual patterns or different things, and that you know that that that unconscious system or the elephant is so powerful that and the writer has such a small amount of power in comparison that if you don't find and you talk about this the book, if you don't find a way to get that unconscious system or the elephant going in the same direction that the writer wants to go, that you're you. You meet with a lot of challenges. Yeah, I think John Height might be the one who have popularized that metaphor, and it is his goal in doing so was to emphasize the difference in size. You know, the riders really small. Our our conscious mind is has very limited capacity. It's overloaded very easily. And I also walk people through some of the literature and what's sometimes called ego depletion, so the fact that when you exert cognitive control it gets depleted. You then are less able to exert it in the next moment. So if you exert cognitive control and focus on a really hard math problem, uh, you're the next moment, you're you're less able to resist cookies, even though you're on a diet. You just your worldpower it gets depleted. And so any viable system where we're going to actually change our behavior has got to respect the elephant. It's got to take into account that we are this tiny rider, and you're not going to make the elephant do something radically different than what the elephant wants to do. But you can guide it, and you can nudge it in a certain direction. And and the nice thing about the rider is it's far sighted enough that it can kind of see down the line how nudging the elephant a little bit every day can actually get it to go to someplace that is in the long run, quite different from where it's going right now. One of the things that I found interest in reading through the book was several different places talking about that in order to get to the uway state to a certain degree, which I think you talk about in the book, is similar to the more modern psychological concept of flow, except that it's it's a it's a little bit broader than that. It's it's a little bit more social and values based than that. And we maybe we'll explore that a little bit later, but that one of the keys to getting into that state is being able to essentially downregulate the that that conscious mind. You talk a little bit about some of the science around how exercise has the ability to sort of downregulate that very conscious mind, and that's why people tend to experience maybe that runners high to a certain degree, that sense of oneness, that sense of ease and peace with the world. Um. You also talk about how there's science out there about the fact that if we think about and analyze things too much, that sort of rumination can actually impact our ability to experience and identify pleasure. Yeah, so this is you know, there's a lot of work has been done on the paradoxical effect of conscious intentions. So there are a lot of goals that we cannot pursue directly. So relaxation, happiness, attractiveness. Uh, they're the kind of creativity I think is one of these as well. When you pursue them directly, they they flee from you. And one of the things I talked about is why this would be so, and it's because it is directly. If you think about the two system nature of the human mind. When you're trying to relax or you're trying to be happy and not think about things, you're you're trying to you part of the brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're using to do the shutting down. So it's like trying to dissemble a bicycle while you're riding on it. It's just it's it's it's directly paradoxical. And so all of these early Chinese thinkers that I look at trying to come up with ways to get around what is what is paradox? And so it's important that to realize that it's a real paradox. If there was some kind of solution to it, would it would just go away and there wouldn't be all this to years of religious debate about how to get into these spiritual states. So the trick is how do you get around the paradox? And and that's where the debates happened about, you know, do you use meditative type techniques to use a lot of training and hope the training falls away. Each of the thinkers has their own particular view on how you how you get around the central tension of using your conscious mind to shut itself down. M M. You talk mainly about three main teachers Confucius laud say, did I say that correctly? Get louds of loudza? And then Mensius Menus and then also DWAs at the end. So the second daois thinker. So if we could maybe spend you know, a brief time on on the first couple menus is I found a lot of what was going on there resonated with a lot of things we talked about on the show. So maybe we'll dig a little bit deeper there. But let's start with Confucius. Yeah, so Confucius and also his later followers sins at the end of the Warring States, was an externalist, what I call an externalists. So basically the the and this is the classic Confucian strategy, which is how do you try not to try where you try really hard. So it's about training. It's about using ritual training, so you immerse yourself and these religious ritual wills. You mentally immerse yourself in the classics, so you memorize these ancient classics and you spend time with fellow students and teachers discussing them. You you play classical music, you do other cultural forms of dance and archery. And the idea is that these are all going to reshape you. You're inside in a certain way, and in the beginning it's going to be involved conscious striving. You're gonna have to try. You won't want to do it, it won't feel natural. But there's the claim is that if you do it for long enough, you'll you'll eventually internalize it. So you'll you'll download it into that that's that faster hot system or the the elephant will internalize it. Yeah, so you'll basically have a tame elephant. So if you if you work hard enough to get the elephant going in the right direction and eventually want to do it on its own. So the famous description of Confucius at age seventy, he says, you know, go through all these stages. You know, it's at my heart on learning, I did this and that. And then finally he says, at age seventy, I could follow my heart's desires and never transgress the bounds of propriety. So he could do whatever came into his heart mind, and yet it was all ritually perfect and morally perfect. So that's the confusion strategy. And then you have louds in the primitive is Dao is popping up and saying there's no way that's gonna work, and it's and the center of their critique is really it's not necessarily exactly explicitly the way they put it, but I think it could be put this way is that the confusion strategy makes a lot of sense when you're talking about a physical skill. So it's really clear how if you want to learn how to play tennis, well just training and training and drilling over and over again. Or you want to learn to play the piano, so you do your scales and you practice that. Eventually it's going to be internalized, and the fact that it's not at first is not a problem. Everyone understands how skills are required over time. But when it comes to away that the way the Confucians and Dallas are pursuing, it's really about moral skills. It's not about really being good at playing the piano. It's about being a good person. It's about being compassionate, being empathetic, being fair, and so there is a tension there. Actually Aristotle identified this in the West as well as his tension that he called it the dis analogy between crafts and virtues. But it's basically the case that so if I'm playing the piano and I play a beautifully moving piece and you are moved to tears, and you assume I'm feeling the same thing you're feeling. If you find out later that I wasn't feeling what you were feeling. I was actually thinking about how much money I was going to make. I'm looking out into the audience that they know ticket sales are good. I'm going to make some money off this thing. It doesn't invalidate the performance. It was still a great performance. Virtues, though, are different. So if I see you doing something that seems compassionate, so you give money to a homeless person, you help someone in need, and then I find out later that you did it because you saw me watching, and you weren't motivated by compassion. You were motivated by wanting to impress me, it's no longer it's invalidated. Your action is invalidated. It's no longer a virtue. So we have a very strong feeling that virtuous action requires the right internal motivation. And this is really the heart of the what Louds is worried about with a confusion strategy is that you train people how to be So you have a bunch of people who aren't compassionate, so you get them to do these rituals that express compassion. You get them to read about compassionate people a great compassionate sage kings. You get them to play compassionate music that expresses kind of longing and sorrow about the suffering of the people. Um And but how how is all that training every going to take someone who doesn't feel compassionate and make them really feel it? And what louds of things is going to happen is you're gonna get a bunch of fakers. You're gonna get a bunch of people who can talk until the end of the day about compassion, but they don't actually have the real virtue. And so he his argument is you've got to stop trying, and actually trying is the problem. And if you could shut down your conscious mind and avoid entanglements with these confusions and all their cultural forms and all this this kind of hypocritical stuff they're trying to teach you, you can get back in touch with your really virtuous nature, which has always been there. It's just been waiting for you to uncover it. And that's that's the Daoist strategy, is kind of going back to nature and going back to some kind of original goodness. What I found really interested in reading your book about the Daoist strategy and it's sort of the thing that it's not my favorite book, but it's a book I certainly enjoyed him as aspired is a lot of it is like, well, how how do you how do you do that? What do you do? How do you become that? That sort of thing. And the other thing I was struck by was how it felt to me a little bit like the Daoist side was that we're all inherently good, and civilization and messes us up, which is also very much a Buddhist Buddha nature kind of thought. And then there's also you go to the Western side, which is much more, at least from a Christianity perspective, we are we are bad, original sin, and we are cultured into being better, which is more the Confucian type ideal. And what I really liked about the Menus part was that he seemed to have what seems to me at least the view I take, which is that we've got some of all that in us, and it's a it's a matter of it's back to that parable what are we cultivating? And so that's why I thought a lot of what Mentius was talking about struck like the right balance to me between those two things, maybe you could share a little bit more about his approach. Yeah. So, actually Menshas is the other place where I think the parable really applies to this this early Chinese material, although not quite in the way Mensha's intends. So he's an interesting figure. So he's a Confucian, he's technically a confusion. He thinks he's a follower of Confucius. But if you I argue in the book, and I think it's the case that he's really trying to straddle both sides. So he's arguing, Okay, we have this nature. That's how do we become compassionate If we're not already compassionate, it's because we have the sprouts of compassion inside of us, and if we were careful and we pay attention to our feelings, we can identify these little sprouts of compassion. So there's famous story where he interrogates this king who's a famously evil king. He's oppressing his people. He's he's likes to drink and hang out with his concubines and basically kill people. That's why he enjoys host kind of like a co host. Yeah, so he says to him, you know, you can actually be a true Confucian king, and the king says, well, you obviously don't know me. Look at me. This is what I like to do. And then Mensche tells him the story that he heard from one of his ministers about him sparing the ox, and he walks him through what he was feeling, and the king basically admits he's it's a great dialogue. It's psychologically very rich, because the king gets very embarrassed, and then he finally admits, yeah, I saw this ox being led to slaughter, and he said, had this expression on its face of a look of terror that I couldn't bear. I couldn't bear the sight of this, this look of terror. And Mena says that feeling you had then is the sprout of true benevolence, and if you could actually focus on that thing and strengthen it and bring it out and make it stronger, you will start moving down the road towards being a true king instead of being this terrible tyrant that you are now. So he thinks that we have this set of good sprouts and they don't grow naturally, so that it's like agriculture. You have to water, you have to weed, it requires efforts. So that's the kind of confusion side of it, right, You got to do self cultivation. You need the classics, you need ritual but it's all basically pulling out potentialities, moral potentialities that you have within you if you reflect enough. Now Menches where it doesn't quite fit the parable as Menshes doesn't think that there are other bad sprouts, But I think that actually, if we want to update Menches, a more plausible modern view of the mind is that we you know, we have different sets of dispositions and they serve Some of them are very ancient ones that'serve very good purposes back in our evolutionary history and maybe aren't so appropriate now the way we live now. Others are ones we've learned that may be because of a bad environment or bad experiences, are bad training. And so then I think modernizing Mensches and bringing him into harmony with his parable about the two wolves. What self cultivation is about and getting into the right kind of way is about is figuring out which of these sprouts inside you are the good ones, and identifying them and then focusing on them and trying to strengthen those at the expense of the ones you don't like as much, and that don't lead you in the right direction. So that's mentions. His position, in a way is the compromise position. We have these potentialities within us, but they're not going to grow by themselves anymore than corn is just going to grow if you throw a the ground. You gotta do some work. But you also are working together with with things that are inside potentialities that are within you, which also explains how you can get a virtue that you don't already have because you're actually you do have it, it's just their potential form. It's got to be strengthened. You talked about the mention U way cultivation is about feeling and imagination. That you make a reference between analog and digital processes, and that um that changing our behavior is more of an analog process in the mentioned way. Could you explain that this is a contrast with the dominant theories of ethics in the West, the modern Western philosophy, which are about all systems too, if you want to think of it that way. They're about cold cognition. So how do you learn you're not compassionate right now? How do you learn to be compassionate while you either learn a set of mac sims. So if you're you're deontologists, you learn the categorical imperative, and you learn how to use these rules essentially and figure out which rules apply in any given situation. Then you apply them. You force yourself to act in accordance with the rules. Who are your utilitarian and you say, well, how do you act compassionately? Well, we've got to figure out what's going to maximize whatever good you happen to value for people in this situation. You do the math, and then you act in accordance with what the math tells you to do. And there were people like this in early China too, so there were these most too. Menchu was arguing against who our utilitarians. They were consequentialists and very rationalistic. Mench just thinks that that's actually not gonna work because you want to put this way, because the elephants too strong the ride. The rider doesn't have the ability to just go, oh, we need to go over here and just make the elephant go that way. It just is not gonna work. And if you try to do it, it's gonna piss the elephant off and things are gonna get really ugly. So men just actually thinks it's actively dangerous to to rely upon cold cognition only. So in his model, you do have some help from culture, So you have teachers telling you, you know, these are the kind of impulses that you want to focus on. Uh. And I argue you can see Manches in this dialogue with the King is kind of a moral psychoanalyst. He's like, well, how did you feel when you saw the ox? And you know, how does that? And then how do you feel when you see your people suffering? And the King's like, well, it doesn't bother me, feel pretty fine, and he gets in to see, well, don't you see how that's there's a kind of attention there, and maybe you could try to take that feeling that you had with the ox and learn how to extend it, but crucially slowly. So he says to the king, you know, first try just being a little bit nicer to your family, and then once you get better at that, you can learn how to extend that to people who aren't part of your family. So the idea that the way moral training works is through imaginative extension. You're using your whole body when you're remembering an emotional experience. It's not an abstract thing. You're remembering how you felt. You remember how your stomach clenched when you saw that ox and you felt really bad, and you're then trying to use your imagination to figure out how you could have that same kind of feeling in a place you should be having it where you're not when you see your people suffering because you over tax them or you you make them labor on your palace. So so this is the sense in which I think this confusion model of cultivating using emotions and cultivating your senses is much more empirically plausible. It's much more plausible from a modern psychological perspective than these abstract, ammodal digital forms of ethics that we've had for the last couple hundred years in the West. I'm really drawn to that idea because it's that whole idea sort of of you know, you have these sprouts or these tendencies, and then you can start very small and build upon those in a in a very small way. So that idea of, well, if you don't feel really compassionate in general and you want to learn that, start with something that's really easy to be compassionate towards like your dog, right, you know, you know, it's you know, being compassionate to Chris over here might be a stretch for me. But but but but but his dog, Charlie. Um, but I it's that's that's a common theme that we we talk a lot about on the show, is is starting really small and if you do that, you can you can build. And I really like also that thought of imagination emotion, and I think you talk about in the book because it's something I've been talking about with people recently, and I think it's also in the book around the purpose of you know, one of the reasons that I think literature or movies can be so powerful is because there's a call it moral training if you want. But they're teaching us about the human condition in a very emotional way, which is a lot different than like, as you said, sort of being taught here's the right thing to do, thinking the right thing versus feeling what feels right. Ye, And they're kind of it's like exercise for your moral emotions, especially because you know, literature and now movies allow you to be in a situation that you would not normally be in. So it allows you to experience extreme moral situations, especially when some kid hopefully you will never experience in your real life. Um. But being put in that position and empathizing, having to think your way, feel your way into someone else's position strengthens your moral intuitions and extends them in various ways. And that's precisely the way Menschez is using the classics. For instance, he thinks that these, you know, the poems and the stories about the sage kings are like reading great literature where you actually learn to feel the right kind of things because you're you're being exposed to these emotional experiences vicariously through through literature. Near the end of the book, you kind of wrap things is up by talking about the reason that we tend to be interested in uway and UH is that you know uway is that that feeling of being completely engaged in what you're doing being very effective. And then the dog is more the charisma or the drawing people towards us. And you say that these different Chinese philosophers, what they recommend may work differently in different situations. Um, And could you maybe extrapolate a little bit on that, like, what what are some of the types of things. If I was trying to do this sort of thing, I might think about this approach, And again I like what you say, and that look, this is a genuine paradox. Trying not to try is is really hard to do, and achieving some of these states as hard, which is why people are still thinking about it and talking about it. But you've got a couple guidelines that people might think about. Yeah, well, one of my arguments is the reason we have these different strategies and and none of them ever go away, and no one ever wins, so uh know, and when Zen Buddhism comes into China's and Buddhism takes a really hard kind of z in daois line. So we're not gonna do any practice. If you're going to be a Zen Buddhists, you know, we're gonna just do nothing and just you know, see your Buddha nature and that's it. But very quickly they started setting up practices and you get the split between these different schools of Zen john Buddhism, Um, that's one of them starts to look very gradual. It's like, yeah, we want to see our Buddha nature. We are Buddhas, but we gotta sits Zen for thirty years and to all these rituals. Um. So why is it that none of them ever win? And it's because I think so. First of all, there's differences and people's inborn personalities. So I really think some of these strategies work better for some people than others. So people who tend to be overstructured and tend to not respond flexibly to the world probably need the Daoist techniques a bit more. And I think that's why I've always loved Dwongs of the of the Daoist text, and probably because I'm kind of a creature of habit, kind of uptight, like I like my things the way they are. I don't like new experiences. I kind of uh. And so I think people need different things to break them out of the types of bad habits that they're into. Um. Whereas if you tend to be unstructured and undisciplined, this Confucian training, giving yourself some structure in your life and and having rituals and having particular ways you structure your physical space, how you set up your room and how you set up your office and doing things at certain times every day could be incredible exactly what you need to kind of liberate yourself into spontaneity because you you you need that kind of structure. So there's in our personal differences and it really, I think depends on the individual. You're also going to expect life stage differences. So children are going to be doing more the Confucian stuff than the Daoist stuff. Kids are kind of natural Daoist, that's not they don't need more. They don't need more. Doubt is that what they need is a lot of confusionism, right, because you just don't have the right dispositions. Yet nobody's arguing that the kind of way you want is the way of a three year old. Anyone who's had a three year old realizes that that's not who we want to be. So they need Confucianism, they need structure, they need training, they need to acquire new skills and so but then do you know the converses as you get mature and as you've acquired the types of skills you need, that's when maybe you need to shift into more of the Daoist strategy of letting go or making your mind empty or not trying. Because you've now trained your dispositions, you have everything on board that you need. And the trick now it's actually stopping thinking, letting go. So it's life stage is gonna matter, and then the particular situation is gonna matter, so and and this is something you really have to kind of diagnose on the fly or have your own you know, the king King Shin of Chi is lucky because he had his own personal way advisor next to him in the form of mentions telling him what he needed to focus on. But in any given situation, there are times when if you reflect, you'll realize, Okay, my problem here is that I'm just flowling around. I don't have structure, and if I actually really want to get into the zone and whatever activity is I'm doing here, I need to be more organized about it. I need to have a schedule, I need to have forums. I have to have physical forms given to me um to act in the right way. Whereas there are other times where it's the problem is you're just thinking too much and you're second guessing yourself, or you're thinking about irrelevant things. So you're thinking about, uh, you know, the famous story and the dwongsa is that when people are shooting, having an archery contest and they're just shooting for you know, basically buckles, belt buckles. They their skill is perfect. They start betting for beer money and they their skill gets a little shaky and they start betting for serious money and suddenly, uh, they don't have the same skill they had at the beginning. It's because external considerations are invading your mind and interfering with your ability to focus on your your embodied skill, which which is something you already have. I think the you know, some of the more Confucian approaches, the idea of of putting structure in your life. Um, we we talk about you know, there's I think there's a lot of different readily available information there. What are some of the ways to, as we said earlier, sort of downregulate that thinking mind. We talked a little bit about exercise reference to meditation throughout the book. Yeah, alcohol you talk about at a few points, which is remarkably effective. Um, are there other other other other thoughts there that that that emerged from from some of this learning? Yeah? I think so there's you know, there's chemical means. So one of the reasons I think we like alcohol and drugs is they downregulate our preferntal cortex. That's physiologically what they're doing, and that's the seat of our cold cognition. So it's a kind of fast and dirty way to get into a form of a way. And actually people like Dwongs that use drunkenness as an analogy for for what the spiritual state he wants you to get into. But it's the problem is alcohol wears off and it's it has other side effects that aren't that great. Um. So most of the strategies that the Daoist used, I think could be summed up as using your body to distract your mind. So you're using your body in a way that is either going to distract you from your thoughts so that your thoughts kind of peed aro out on their own, or you're using your body in such a way that your thoughts just naturally damp down, they naturally fade away. And so these people are probably the ones who invented these sitting practices. So, um, they don't talk a lot about them in the Worrying States text that I study, but there's hints that people are sitting meditation there. This one artists says before he goes off to car of wood stands, he sits and forgets it's all along. He forgets about his body and everything. So it seems involved some sort of seated meditation. And the idea is you can use breathing exercises or objectless meditations, so sitting in a certain position and letting your mind clear itself as a way to re empower your body if you want to think about it that way, and let it take over when it needs to take over. But this is of course, you know, people years longer than that coming up with all sorts of techniques for doing this excellent. Well, I think we are kind of at the end of our time. But what I found interesting, you know, kind of kind of coming back to there. There were two last things. One was I was struck by that sort of mention is sort of walking what we would think of is sort of the middle way, which I thought was was really interesting. But I really like the way you tied that up at the end that hey, there's no one size fits all all um depending on all those different circumstances, which I thought was really helpful because it's easy to get locked into thinking if we just do this thing. And the other thing I thought was interesting is that a lot of times, something that works for us today doesn't work for us tomorrow or the week after, and I think that's really really important. And then, um, I thought the best example of what U way is really like and duh was when you referenced Jonathan Richmond's Pablo Picasso as the perfect example of that. So I thought that was thought that was a great way to uh to describe that for the the modern uh punk rock lover, I suppose, um, for anybody who's familiar with that. But Ted, thanks so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed the book. Oh thanks, thanks for having me on the show. All right, take care bye. Yeah. You can learn more about Edward Slingerland and this podcast at one new feed dot net slash Edward